I correctly predicted 8 of last night's qualifiers from semi-final one. It was looking shaky though when Moldova popped out second from the virtual envelopes and then Portugal was fifth. I was two down out of five by that point, but I had all five of the final batch. I did say Moldova would be close, and that Poland was my wildcard (more in hope than expectation), so I partially covered my back on those, but I was very wrong about Portugal. I don't like the song; it bores me rigid, but I'm clearly out of touch with this one. I would guess it's the 50% jury votes which have saved Portugal though. I'd be surprised if televoting alone would have seen it through. We'll see when the full jury and televote results are published (which they eventually will be).

I feel very sorry for Finland, whose song thoroughly deserved to go through. Reaction in the hall led me to believe it would, as it was in the top three or four in terms of crowd response. But we are very near Finland here, so it was a skewed reaction to a Nordic neighbour.

When we were down to two envelopes and I saw on my scrawled notes that Albania hadn't yet been seen, I realised we were going to lose Iceland or Finland, or both. Then Albania came out of envelope number nine and I couldn't decide who I most wanted to come out of number ten, and in the end it was Iceland. I've been told that Iceland was in the final envelope last year as well. Given that it's no longer random paper envelopes, but controlled by the production team, I wonder why they did it again?

Chig is directly descended from the following families. If you have one of these surnames, we're possibly related, so feel free to get in touch:
Crowe, Harborne/Harbourne, Higgins, Hutchins, O'Sullivan/Sullivan, Talliss/Tallis.